Reliably Hiding Data on Your PC – Plausible Deniability

Oct 232012
 

Reliably Hiding Data on Your PC - Plausible DeniabilityReliably Hiding Data on Your PC – Plausible Deniability

If you want real protection for your PC and the data on it, then you need software that gives you the option of Reliably Hiding Data on Your PC. Much software, Windows and Mac included, don’t offer this level of security. For complete security you need software that offers ‘Plausible Deniability‘. This article isn’t going to go into the minutae of what ‘Plausible Deniability’ entails, you can click on the link to find that out, but in short, it gives you an out if somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you to show them the contents of your hard drive. It is a very, very important concept in a world in which electronic data is, increasingly, easy to access and interpret and very difficult to protect. Therefore, protecting information which you do not, for whatever reason, wish to get into certain hands, has become a very hot topic. It’s your data, it is up to you to protect it.

If you’ve got files on your PC that you’d rather others didn’t access then it is advisable to use security software to encrypt your entire hard drive, or even just certain folders if you wish. For true protection you need software that offers the option of the aforementioned ‘Plausible Deniability’ whereby your encrypted folder (which looks like a complete file of random data) can contain another encrypted folder which cannot be found, nor can any evidence of it be found, unless you know for a fact that it is there and you have the password to access it.

Do not be fooled into thinking that any commercially available Operating System software such as Windows or Mac can offer such protection, they can’t. When you read an OS password protected file on another PC, using a caddy that is freely available on eBay for about $10, you can generally fairly easily access every single file on that hard drive.

Should standard protection not be sufficient, by keeping any ultra-sensitive information in a second encrypted folder inside the outer encrypted folder nobody can ever prove that anything exists other than the first folder – this is Plausible Deniability. This means that, for instance, if you were forced at gunpoint to reveal the contents of the encrypted folder the aggressor would not suspect the existence of another folder, it simply cannot be found anywhere on the system and is only visible and accessible on provision of the password associated with it when logging into the encryption software.

Of course any encryption software is only as strong as the password you use, but that’s a piece for another day. It is also advisable that you use an IT company other than the one that carries out your day to day IT maintenance needs to carry out any encryption operations you may require. It helps keep everything above board and avoids any problems that may arise with them holding on to passwords that could endanger your data at a later stage, as any aggressor will know who does your general IT and will no doubt be able to easily access passwords from them.

My Twitter is Spamming People

Oct 202012
 

My Twitter account is Spamming People - what should I do?My Twitter is Spamming People

If you are getting complaints from your Twitter Followers that your Twitter account is sending out stuff like: “This is definitely the fastest way to shed body fat in 2 weeks” or “My profile was viewed 998 times JUST TODAY! Click here to see how many views you got! bit.ly/Xx1wNW” then your Twitter account has been hacked. This may be someone who’s got their hands on your password and is using your account to send out the spam tweets or, more likely, some program installed on your PC has accessed your Twitter account and is sending out spam tweets when your PC is turned on. Either way, you need to deal with it or people will report you as a spam Twitter user and your account will be shut down.

My Twitter is Spamming People – What Should I Do?

The first thing to do is change your password:

1) Log into Twitter, click on the Cog in the top right hand corner of the screen then click on Settings.

2) On the Apps tab on the left de-authorise anything you think shouldn’t be there, or even anything you’re not quite sure about. If something’s not working afterward you can always grant authorisation again.

3) Click on Password at the top left of the screen and change your password.

4) Back in Account, scroll down and click in the box ‘Require personal information to reset my password’ – this means you’ll have to put in your email address or phone number in order to change the password in future, which helps avoid hackers getting into your account again.

5) Clear your browser cache (this link will help if you don’t know how to)

6) Log out of Twitter then sign back in again with your new password.

My Twitter is Spamming People – Any Other Suggestions?

When you’ve done all that you should download and install a Spyware detection and removal program. We recommend either Malwarebytes (www.malwarebytes.org) or Spybot Search & Destroy (www.safer-networking.org). Both are free and both are also excellent. Update your data files on both and then scan your PC or laptop for malware. It’s no harm to do this once a month or so anyway to ensure that you’ve not picked up any nasties along the way.

It is important to note that having an anti-spyware product or anti-virus product installed DOES NOT GUARANTEE that you will not get viruses or spyware, but it does give you a far better chance of saving your vital documents and files if you do get an infection. Most anti-virus products require you to set them up to do regular scans. If you don’t do this then you’re computer may as well not be protected at all.

If you feel unsure about any of the above and would like to have a professional take a look at your computer to make sure that it is virus and spyware free please do give us a call.

Web Design Tipperary

Sep 172012
 

Web Design Tipperary 

Clogheen-Website

Clogheen Community Website

Your website is often the first impression that people get of your business or organisation. It is therefore very important that it is easy to find and expresses your organisation in an attractive manner.

If you are looking for ‘Web Design Tipperary’ to get your web page to the top of the ‘natural search listings’ using  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rather than having to pay to get your site to the top of the listings, then Dzyne.net is the company you are looking for.

DZyne.net uses the most correct and up to date SEO techniques to ensure that, not only does your new or updated website look wonderful, but it is also a cost effective tool to get your business or organisation noticed.

It’s all very well having a really flashy site that looks really ‘cool’ with all the latest Flash, Java and Ajax technologies (which we use where necessary, but not just for the sake of being flashy), but it is utterly useless unless your site can actually be found.

Dzyne.net will ensure that your site is SEO optimised, meaning that each new post or update you put on your site will be an extra step in your quest to have your site listed as high as possible for the specific ‘keywords’ for which you want your company found.

Not only that, Dzyne.net will create your site in a clean, easy to navigate and uncluttered manner. Everything is there to be found with just a click or two, due to the wonders of exceptional web design.

Google Authorship

DZyne.net is also an expert at having its clients listed by Google’s Authorship (when  you see pictures associated with links in a Google search, see example below). If you would like to be listed as a Google Author, then give us a call and we can put the coding in place to make sure this happens for you. You do not have to have a website designed by us to enable Google Authorship, we can organise it as a standalone service.

Picture beside search in Google

Essentially, if you provide the information on your Tipperary organisation, club, business or town, we’ll do the rest, and we’ll make sure that you get found, without having to pay an absolute fortune for the privilege.

Take a look at our Web Design Catalogue for some examples of sites we’ve completed recently.

High Ranking SEO Proposal Scams

Aug 032012
 

High Ranking SEO Proposal Scams

SEO Proposal Scams

I’m hoping you’re reading this before you’ve succumbed to one of the above scams – those offering to make your website more attractive to Google and almost immediately shoot you up the rankings because your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, not to put too find a point on it, terrible.

Firstly, if you take a look above, the picture is of the Spam part of our Gmail inbox, you’ll see that over the past month almost every communication stored there is from an SEO Enhancement company of some sort. Gmail doesn’t treat them as spammers (not scammers, but there are a lot of similarities) for no good reason. These guys are sharks, no two ways about it.

The really ironic part of all this is that the very fact that there are that many scammers finding DZyne.net and spamming us with SEO Proposals (the fact that they are sending SEO proposals to a Web Design company shows that they never even look at what the domain owners actually do) means that our SEO is, in fact, very good. They wouldn’t be able to find us otherwise. I’ve pointed this out to a few of them. Oddly enough they never reply.

These scammers almost invariably mention that they’ve found us via Google Adwords (the paid for adverts you see with the vaguely pink background at the top of Google searches) which is impossible because we’ve never paid for a Google Advert in our lives, nor do we ever intend to. Don’t get me wrong. Adwords has its place if you really need to get a (usually new) site to the top of the search engine rankings immediately and you’re prepared to pay for it. Google can take a few months to properly crawl a site and give it a ranking for searches so it is a way around this restriction. Otherwise it’s just a waste of money. We don’t have to use Google’s AdWords service because our natural Search Engine Optimisation is incredibly good so the site gets found very easily for most of the search strings we want it to be found for. The same goes for the many sites we design, they are created with the same very effective SEO back-end.

In short, if you think the Search Engine Optimisation in your website is lacking in some way, then don’t respond to one of these scam merchants, who will in fact do absolutely nothing to your site once you’ve paid them. Contact a reputable organisation, preferrably one in your own locality, like ours of course, that can guide you correctly in the best means to have your site found for the search terms you desire by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Problems with Windows 8

Jul 022012
 

Windows 8 Start ScreenProblems with Windows 8

At the time of Microsoft’s new Windows 8 release this is going to be one very popular topic because, believe me, there are going to be a lot of people not happy about the new Windows Metro User Interface (Metro UI) which is that tiled screen you get on start up (see pic).

One of the first things you’ll notice about Windows 8 is that it makes you log-in using whatever account you used when you set it up first (a Gmail account in my case, but it will be whatever email address you used at the start). This is a bit of a pain, so here’s how to get rid of it and log straight into the OS.

You’ll also notice that it takes certain things that used to be very easy that we’d learned to do over time and chucked them straight out the window (pardon the pun). The first one of these is shutting down one of the Metro UI programs (what it refers to as Metro Apps, homage to Apple we would guess. These allow you set up your mail, social programs, photos, etc. on that strange desktop). Quite aside from the fact that everything in Metro runs full-screen (just what you need if you’ve got a 21″ widescreen monitor), it doesn’t let you shut them down as you would have before either. Now, instead of having a nice little X on the top right hand corner of your program to shut it down, you’ve got to hold your cursor over the top left hand corner of the App until you get a Hand icon. You then take the app (it reduces in size) and drag it to the bottom of the screen. You can also use the Windows button on your PC to revert to the Metro UI and leave your program work away in the background. This is, of course, a facility designed for those with touch screen computers or tablets but, in the interim, it is a royal pain in the backside. I don’t yet have a touchscreen PC and may not have one for quite some time, so I’m going to be stuck with this pain in the nether regions for quite some time. As the Queen might say, we are not amused Microsoft.

As we pointed out in the earlier post on Windows 8 the ‘Start’ menu at the bottom left hand side of the screen has now been jettisoned. If you want it back, and many people do (me among them) you can have a non-Microsoft program re-install a version of it (there are a few of them). Here are some – AskVG, Start8 and Classic Shell.

Finally, for this post at least, Windows 8 has made a total dog’s dinner out of simply turning off your PC – see here for details on how to do it, but let’s be honest, it shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out. You can just hit the start button and send the PC to sleep, another homage to Apple which very seldom shuts anything down fully, it just puts them in a low power sleep mode which allows a very quick restart. Many people do actually want to shut the whole shebang down, however, and MS has made this a lot more difficult than it should be.

Microsoft does have a tendency to produce things on the basis of groupthink on occasion, this would appear to be one of them. Another was the disasterous effort at networking your entertainment media that was Media Center – that was simply a cartload of rubbish.

As StarDock CEO Brad Wardell says: “It’s schizophrenic. Is it a tablet OR a desktop OS? It tries to be both…and neither.” You can read all of Wardell’s objections to the new OS here (his company designed Start8 by the way).

Should I Install Windows 8?

Jun 302012
 

Windows 8 Start ScreenShould I Install Windows 8?

Microsoft’s next Operating System, Windows 8, is about to be launched on a suspecting public (and they’ve been suspecting for a long time at this stage). The big question is, should you bother? What is it that Windows 8 promises that Windows 7 or Vista or even XP (which according to statistics still accounts for 50% of the Operatings Systems in the world at this time) couldn’t manage?

You should note that the version of Windows 8 that we (and any other self respecting techie in the world) got it’s hands on is only a Release Preview, so it’s not the finished article. It is, however, very close to what Windows 8 will look and work like when released (God alone knows when that might be but you can be pretty certain it’ll be at least 2 months before Christmas 2012 in order to access the spending splurge that normally accompanies that time of the year – cynical I know, but true nonetheless).

Firstly, you should know where I stand on the whole ‘new Windows’ platform in general. I personally will not install any windows platform for at least 6 months after its initial release for the simple reason that Microsoft has proven over the years that it’s first releases are absolutely crawling with bugs – i.e. they don’t work properly out of the box, have loads of things that go wrong and gradually fix them with ‘updates’ over a period of time. When these fixes become incredibly large and voluminous they release ‘Service Packs’ to put all the fixes together. In essence, Microsoft is shockingly bad at releasing bug-free software first day. So don’t panic, you’ve got plenty of time to get your hands on this thing and it generally is a bit of a let-down if you are an ‘early-adopter’ because it will be full of annoying programming glitches. You should also remember that application software like accounts pacakges, printer & camera drivers, photo & video editing packages, etc. can take a while to have updates released that will work with the new software.

Microsoft uses us, the paying customer, to tell it what is wrong with a new operating system and it then spends the rest of the lifecycle fixing the problems we find as it goes on. In case you hadn’t noticed.

A further proviso, should you need one, is that Windows 8 cannot be rolled back, so if you install it over your current version of Windows 7 and wish to revert you’ll have to re-install Windows 7 from scratch (losing all your documents) in order to get your original operating system back. This is a very cute ploy on the part of Microsoft as, when it comes to the time to charge for Windows 8 (you didn’t honestly think you were going to get it for free did you? What do you think this is? Linux?) there will be no way back for those who have opted to upgrade their original operating system – the very epitome of a captive audience. If you are going to install the Windows 8 Preview then do yourself a favour and install it in a blank portion of your current Hard Disk partition (as a dual  or multi-boot) or take out your current hard drive, invest in another and install it on the new one. It may cost a few bob to do this, but you could save yourself a lot of heartache in the long run.

Windows 8

So, after that clarification, on to Windows 8 and what you can expect. Let me preface this by saying that this is a cursory ‘first look’ examination of the Operating System (OS) based on nothing much more than how it looks, feels and performs to the lay user. It is not meant to be an in-depth examination of the ‘under the hood’ elements of the system, you can find those in many other places if you look hard enough.

If you’ve got an XBox or a Windows Phone, you ‘ll probably be saying ‘this looks very familiar’ and it does. Windows is, very actively, trying to assimilate all its diverse platforms so that people who use one will be familiar with another when they start to use it. Good in theory, but probably bad for anyone that’s tried to do anything on the XBox menu. It’s an absolute dog of a thing and you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, not to mind your next computer.

On first glace the interface looks very, very different. But it’s not really. As with Windows 7, Windows 8 is an evolution, not a revolution. The shock of seeing the initial ‘Start’ screen (see initial post photo) can be quickly erased by moving on to the Dashboard screen, which makes it look a lot more familiar, presuming that’s what you’re looking for.

The one big thing that everybody will notice, and quite a few will miss, is the ubiquitous ‘Start’ button (used to have the four paned Windows screen in the bottom left hand corner, in later years referred to as ‘the Globe’). It’s gone. Nothing there at all. To some people this will be like losing a digit, or even an entire limb. But Microsoft claims anything that could be accessed using this single access point can now be found using the new Start screen. This theory may take some time to catch on. Personally I used to use the Start icon rather a lot (to find programs and Control Panel items that weren’t on the Desktop, but then I’m an IT professional and I probably go to places that normal users don’t visit that often). Time will tell no doubt, but I personally feel the loss of this button quite a bit. I’d equate it do losing your PC or mobile phone for a few days to a technician. When asked do you use it a lot you may well say, ‘well not really’, but when it’s actually gone you realise just how much you did use it and how much you miss it when it is not there. That’s how I feel about the Globe – I really, really, really miss it. It’s been there since Windows 95 (see below). That’s 17 years with the ‘Start’ menu, several generations in computing terms. Let’s see if I’ll eventually get over this.

In reality, though, that button hasn’t actually gone away at all, if you hold your cursor over the right hand corner of the screen you still get a similar, if slimmed down, menu that connects you to ‘Settings’, ‘Devices, ‘Start’, ‘Share’ and ‘Search’. This may, or may not, suffice. Clicking on ‘Start’, as suggested, gets you back to the ‘Start’ Screen, which in one way or another connects to everything you need to get to. Only time will tell whether this takes or not.

This, as you might have guessed, is only the first in what I would imagine will be numerous posts on the new MS Operating System. We would hope that these would be no-holds barred episodes that might guide you in your decision of whether you wish to upgrade right now, or not. Microsoft, as is its wont, will make sure you have to upgrade eventually via Planned Obsolesence, but you will have to decide whether to upgrade now or put it off until a later stage.

The Tech Heads, Clonmel

Jun 262012
 

The Tech Heads in Clonmel shuts downThe Tech Heads, Clonmel

It is with great sadness that we learned of the demise of the Tech Heads PC Repair Centre in Mary St. Mall, Clonmel.

You might think that, as competitors, we’d be delighted to see the back of them, but this is not so. There’s room for everybody in the market and plenty of tech firms flourishing in an area shows that there is demand, which is good for everybody in that market. Demand drives consumers which in turn makes firms strive to do better to gain more market share. Everybody benefits. Consumers get better service, firms learn to be lean and customer driven and are forced to charge competitive prices. Firms such as the Tech Heads, who were ambitious and hardworking young guys, going to the wall isn’t really a good omen for anybody. This is all the more the case in Clonmel where this is the latest in a long line of businesses in the centre of Clonmel closing down. It’s just not good for the town.

The guys running the Tech Heads had the ‘cajones’ to go out there and start up a new company in an environment that is anything but conducive to business start-ups and for that alone you’d have to give them a lot of credit. Hopefully they won’t be too disheartened by this and will go on to bigger and better things.

It’s a very depressing fact of modern Irish business life that property owners, local councils and the Revenue have got their heads buried so far up their nether regions they are naval gazing from the inside. The cost for a small business of council rates in particular, but also rent, minimum wages, employer tax health and pension contributions, prohibitive hidden tax rates and the labour overhead of managing VAT accounts is crippling small businesses right around the country. This allied to a complete lack of small business finance from Irish banking institutions that are effectively bust, gives absolutely no chance to ambitious start up companies in Ireland. It is no wonder our best and brightest youth are flocking to Australia, New Zealand and Canada to countries that foster an entrepreneurial culture and reward those willing to take a chance. In Ireland a self-employed business owner gets absolutely no help from anybody and is actively sought out for punishment by the government.

This same government falls over backwards to bring large IT players like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Twitter to Ireland with lucrative tax deals, yet it pays lip-service to helping small indigenous companies survive in the most hostile business environment seen in this country in the past 50 years.

Rant over. We very much hope the guys at the Tech Heads get back on their feet really soon and realise that life is a journey, not a destination. It’s all part of the learning curve. They will, no doubt, go on to much better things in life.

Finitro Forte Plus Facebook

Jun 132012
 

Finitro Forte Plus Banner

Finitro Forte Plus Facebook 

Ireland Finitro Facebook Advert

If you’ve been on Facebook in Ireland recently you’ll have no doubt seen the ubiquitous ireland.finitro.com advert it currently contains.

If you’ve visited this post before you’ll know that we’ve been less than complimentary to Finitro, believing this to be a complete scam.

To our surprise, we were contacted by Finitro themselves, somewhat puzzled by the post. In order to change our minds they have offered to send us 3 months supply of the product to test it and draw our own conclusions. So we agreed to this offer.

In the interest of fairness we felt it only right that we should remove the content of the post in the interim.

Once we’ve had a chance to test the product we will be more than happy to report back on this page exactly how the experiment has gone.

Update

We received 3 months supply of Finitro Forte Plus tablets on September 13th, 2012. We’ll be reporting on how we’ve found it once it has had sufficient time to have an impact. We also received a tube of Finotro Joint Cream, which we’ll also try out at times of joint pain.

All we can say with any authority at this stage is that the product does definitely exist.

Further Update:

I used this product for 3 months and can safely say that, over the period, it had virtually no effect at all for me. The first two weeks I thought there was some reduction in pain but this quickly dissipated and I was right back to where I began very quickly. This is obviously not a proper clinical trial, you would need to get opinions from many people using the product, but I’m fairly sure a good diet with plenty of Omega 3 fats and some high potency Norwegian Cod Liver Oil tablets will do a lot more for you than this particular product.

You can ignore many of the comments on the end of the post, the vast majority are put there by Finitro employees trying to give links and some credibility to the product. This alone should tell you all you need to know about the product and the company producing it.

Verdict: Avoid – very expensive way to achieve virtually nothing.

Comments are now closed on this post so please don’t submit them, they’ll just be ignored.

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